Blu-ray is now officially more popular than plain ol’ DVD in Japan. Wait, let me rephrase that: there are now more Blu-ray disc recorders in Japan than there are DVD recorders. More than 50 percent of disc recorders in Japan are now of the Blu-ray variety.
The distinction is important. It’s not that Blu-ray disc sales have overtaken their DVD counterpart, but that people there are now buying more Blu-ray recorders than DVD recorder. Considering I don’t know anyone who bought a DVD recorder to begin with—DVR and TiVo rule the day—I’d say this info isn’t nearly as important as, say, the Blu-ray Disc Association would have you believe.
Again, for the 80 billionth time, Blu-ray has hell of a fight on its hands, despite the fact that HD DVD has been dead for nearly a year. There’s the perception that DVDs look and sound “good enough,” the fact that Blu-ray discs don’t offer the same practical improvement that DVDs did over VHS (no more rewinding, chapter selection, commentaries, fun but useless extras, etc.) and that Blu-ray discs are still regularly $10-$15 more expensive than their DVD counterpart. In this economy, folks are looking to save as much money as they can, and who could blame them?
Except that for Japan it is important, given that the Japanese absolutely love DVD recording of their shows.
Blu Ray overtaking the DVD on that field is a significant advancement on the Japanese market.
This being said, Blu Ray has obviously quite the fight until it can (maybe) overtake DVD, but I think the 147.000 BR player sold (aside PS3s) this Black Friday week were a good sign :)
So were the 100k units of The Dark Knight sold in -one- day in England, or the 500.000 BR rentals attained by Netflix 1 month ahead of projections…